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As crowds gather at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice, Hugh Newman and Robin Heath, authors of new book, Megalith, examine the site’s importance and its place among the world’s sacred sites

6,500 years older than Stonehenge, 7,000 years before the pyramids of Egypt were constructed, predating the agricultural revolution, a vast megalithic complex sat atop the hills near present day Şanliurfa, southeast Turkey. Göbekli Tepe was flourishing an astonishing 12,000 years ago and its preserved stone circles (the oldest in the world thus far discovered, numbering as many as 60 across the site) exhibit impressive degrees of technical and artistic skill. They consist of T-shaped pillars up to 20 ft tall, many decorated with animal reliefs (scorpions, boars, lions, etc) and abstract human forms wearing belts with enigmatic ‘H’ and ‘U’ shapes. The taller stones rest in shallow nests on bedrock with small supportive dry-stone walls built in between. In some enclosures two central pillars orient towards a holed stone, the largest and oldest is 65ft wide. An enormous limestone pillar still sits in the nearby quarry, a staggering 24ft long.

Göbekli Tepe, Turkey (photo: Teomancimit/Wikimedia Commons)

Over some 3,000 years the circles were filled in with rubble to create mounds, and other circular enclosures built on top. Then, around 8000 BC the entire complex was carefully reconstructed and covered up. Interestingly, the oldest rings are the biggest and most sophisticated. Like later sites across the world, astronomical alignments are evident. Figures depicted on the Vulture Stone may be the earliest representations of zodiacal and other constellations (including Cygnus). Our earliest surviving building seem to be an observatory, built to track precession, the 25,800-year cycle of the pole stars. Unusual cup-marks on the bedrock and on top of some of the oldest pillars prefigure British cup-marks, thousands of years later.

Closer to home

Turkish stone circles were being constructed more than 12,000 years ago. Elsewhere around the Mediterranean, other early sites testify to similar activity. Atlit Yim, a submerged semicircle off the coast of Israel dates to 6900BC, the earliest phase of the Cromeleque dos Almendres in Portugal dates to 6000BC, and Karahunge in Armenia goes back to 5500BC.

Six and a half thousand years ago, what we now call megalithic structures began to appear in Brittany, France and Britain (megalith means ‘huge stone’). Ancient British tribes heaped earth upon dry-stone walled chambers to create tomb temples called long barrows. These enigmatic sites, such as the West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury, date mostly from the early Neolithic, and predate the much grander constructions at Avebury, Silbury Hill and Stonehenge.

The earliest circles in the British Isles, the great boulder circles of Sligo in Ireland, date to around 4600BC, and monolithic rings then remained all the rage until around 1400BC, when construction stopped.

Thousands of people travelled from all over Britain to gather at Stonehenge and nearby Durrington Walls for the winter solstice to meet, feast, frolic, marry, dance, trade, share information and observe the heavens. Compacted earth within other rings supports other local folk memories of people dancing and celebrating. Is this why early Christians were so keen to control these sites and link them with the devil?

Many circles have acoustic properties that can enhance and relocate the human voice; some stones, when hit, reverberate. Were these used to affect human consciousness? Men-an-tol in Cornwall, is said to cure sick infants. Research suggests that the circle builders were interested in telluric currents and underground water as a way of ‘charging’ seeds and grains to increase yields. At Scorhill on Dartmoor, horses were unwilling to ride through the stone circle, and there is a similar account from Avebury in 1823.

Originally known as ‘The Giants Dance’, no other stone circle in the world has a design as sophisticated as Stonehenge. Like Avebury it has an avenue, which was lined with regularly spaced stones and may once have terminated at a stone circle on the banks of the River Avon in Amesbury. Interestingly, three massive timber posts were erected at Stonehenge around 8000BC, but nothing further was constructed there until work began on the stone circle 5,000 years later. Excavations have shown that bluestones from the Presili Mountains in Wales were used in its construction.

Sacred burials

The Stonehenge landscape includes many examples of what are known as barrows. Many of these contained burials or cremated remains. The artefacts interred alongside the dead have provided archaeologists with much information about social patterns within the Wessex Culture. The foetal position of many of the skeletons suggests a rebirth from within Mother Earth. Many burial chambers throughout the entire megalithic culture are aligned to the midwinter sunrise or sunset, supporting such a theory, the symbolism being that, at the shortest days of midwinter, the “death” of the Sun thereafter leads to its resurrection, a daily increase in light, strength and noonday height, as each sunrise and sunset occurs more to the north.

Up to 40 ,000 people arrive each year in the hope of observing the midsummer sunrise from the monument. Stonehenge is a symbol or icon of Albion, the ancient wisdom of Britain and of different cultural values from a vanished time. Using Stonehenge as a lens, we can truly see into the mind of a neolithic architect and thereby connect back to our prehistoric ancestors.

10 things you didn’t know about Stonehenge

1. Midwinter
A massive party used to be held at Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge every midwinter, with people arriving to feast from all over the British Isles.

2. Nineteen
The 19 stones of the bluestone horseshoe represent the 19 years of the Sun-Moon Metonic Cycle – if you have a full moon on your birthday, you’ll have another one 19 years later. The Greek astronomer Meton, after whom the metonic cycle is named, lived 2,000 years after the bluestone horse shoe was erected.

3. The half width stone
One stone in the Sarsen Circle is half width – you can still see it today – so the actual number of stones in the main circle is 29.5, the number of days between full moons. (The actual lunar month averages 29.53059 days, which is 44 minutes more than 29.5 days.)

4. The station stone rectangle
If you enlarge the 5-by-12 Station Stone Rectangle 2,500 times, its westernmost corners land on Lundy Island and the Preseli Bluestone Quarry in Wales, where the first stones from Stonehenge came from. The centre of Lundy Island is located exactly west of Stonehenge. The Preseli Hills lie due north of Lundy, and connect back to Stonehenge to define a giant 5-12-13 Pythagorean right angled triangle.

5. 10,000 years old
The oldest postholes at Stonehenge were found in the old tourist car park, now the turning area for buses. They were dated to around 8000BC. From the centre of Stonehenge, these posts marked the extreme northerly moonset during the moon’s major standstill, every 18.6 years. This event locates the celestial position of the [non-visible] lunar nodes, and these govern when eclipses can occur.

6. The Aubrey Circle
The 56 Aubrey holes probably once held the bluestones and formed the earliest structure at Stonehenge. A circle with 56 markers around its circumference can be used to track the position of the sun and moon against the stars and predict eclipses. Only 56 markers (or multiples of 56) can perform this remarkable feat.

7. Stones from Avebury
The Sarsen Stones at Stonehenge actually came from close to Avebury, where they had been deposited as a glacial moraine – you can still see huge raw sarsen stones near Avebury at Lockeridge and on Fyfield Down.

8. The level lintel circle
The sarsen lintels circle was built to be perfectly level, despite Stonehenge being sited on sloping ground, no mean feat. To achieve this astonishing feat the length of each of the 30 sarsen uprights must have been accurately measured and its hole depth adjusted to the correct depth such that when the stone was finally set in place, its top would be at the correct level to receive its lintel.

9. Stonehenge’s cousin
A stone circle within a henge at Meini Gwry, close to the Preseli Bluestone site, had many of the same design characteristics as Stonehenge, a circular henge containing a stone circle within, and an entrance and stone-lined avenue.

10. Egyptian measures
The inside diameter of the lintel circle was 97.3 feet, and the outside diameter was 104.3 feet. The width of each lintel is therefore 6.95 feet, and its outer length that of a circle whose diameter is half this width, 3.478 feet, or two geographic Egyptian royal cubits of 1.7378 feet. The outside circumference of the sarsen circle is 327.8 feet, the length of twelve lunar orbits, each of 27.32 days length (of time).

Megalith: Studies in Stone will be published on 21 June by Wooden Books, £16.99

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